Inside Dell’s billion-dollar IoT push

Dell Technologies plans to invest US$1 billion over the next three years on new internet of things (IoT) products, solutions, labs, partner program and ecosystem.

The tech giant unveiled its new IoT push on 10 October, announcing the creation of an IoT division, as well as new IoT-specific products, labs, a partner program and new consumption models.

The company's new IoT division will be led by the CTO of Dell Technologies subsidiary, VMware, Ray O'Farrell, and is charged with overseeing the development of IoT products and services across the Dell Technologies group.

According to Dell, the new IoT Solutions Division will combine internally developed technologies with offerings from the company’s broader ecosystem.

In addition to the company’s core focus on new and emerging IoT-related technology and services, Dell’s strategy is to grow its IoT footprint with a suitably-designed partner program and associated ecosystem.

Dell said that its IoT Solutions Partner Program is a “carefully curated, multi-tiered program” comprising more than 90 partners from technology players such as Intel, Microsoft and SAP, along with various start-ups.

The program is set to support partners across all Dell Technologies businesses, allowing for easier collaboration and implementation of blueprints, the company said.

At the same time, Dell said that IoT technology is creating new revenue models for customers and, in turn, it is offering new financing options to support those customers.

Specifically, Dell provides cloud-like payment options through its Dell Financial Services flexible consumption models. These payment solutions are available across the Dell Technologies group of businesses and are aimed at giving customers flexibility in relation to technology acquisition and consumption.

According to Dell, the move to expand its IoT offering comes as customers express a growing need for a single company to “pull together complete IoT solutions” that can be deployed within their organisations.

"Dell Technologies has long seen the opportunity within the rapidly growing world of IoT, given its rich history in the edge computing market," said VMware’s EVP and CTO, Ray O'Farrell, who is also general manager for Dell Technologies’ IoT division.

"Our new IoT Division will leverage the strength across all of Dell Technologies family of businesses to ensure we deliver the right solution – in combination with our vast partner ecosystem – to meet customer needs and help them deploy integrated IoT systems with greater ease,” he said.

Already, Dell provides a number of technology solutions aimed at the IoT market, including its Edge Gateways, which can be secured and managed by VMware Pulse IoT Control Centre.

However, the company has several new product development initiatives as well. These inclue Dell EMC’s Project Nautilus', which is software that enables the querying of data streams from IoT gateways in real time.

Also under development is Dell’s Project Fire, a hyper converged platform part of the VMware Pulse family of IoT solutions that includes simplified management, local compute, storage and IoT applications such as real-time analytics.

Additionally, Dell said that technologies like processor accelerators will increase the speed of analytics closer to the edge, while collaboration with tech partners like VMware, Intel and NVIDIA reflect opportunities to optimise servers for AI, machine learning and deep learning performance.

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